Читаем The Wreck Of The Mary Deare полностью

No salvage boat lay alongside. No light suddenly flickered to guide us to the warmth of a cabin. We called and called, but nobody answered. The ship was dead, devoid of life — as dead as she had been the day we’d left her there.

‘My God!’ Patch breathed. ‘We’re the first. Nobody has been here.’ There was a note of relief, almost exultation in his voice, and I knew he was thinking of the thing that lay buried amidst the coal of the port bunker. But all I cared about at that moment was that I was cold and wet and hurt and that, instead of the bunk and dry clothes, the warmth of food and drink and the companionship of human beings I had expected, there was nothing — nothing but the slime-covered, barnacle-encrusted shell of a wreck that had been battered by the seas for six long weeks.

‘We’ll get some dry clothes and have a sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ll feel better then.’ He had sensed my mood. But when we had staggered back to the bridge housing and felt our way down the black iron tunnel of the alleyway to what had been his cabin, we found that the sea had been there. The door grated on sand as we forced it open and a freezing wind drove at us through portholes that stared like two luminous eyes, empty of glass. The desk had been ripped from its fastenings and lay on its side in a corner, the drawers of the bunk that contained his and Taggart’s clothes were full of water and the big wall cupboard contained nothing but a sodden, gritty heap of blankets, coats and old papers.

We tried the main deck then, where the saloon and the galley were. But that was worse. The sea had swept the whole length of the alleyways, into the officers’ cabins and right aft to the crew’s quarters. Everything we touched in the pitch-black darkness was sodden, filmed with slime; there wasn’t a place the sea hadn’t reached.

‘Maybe the poop is still dry.’ Patch said it wearily, without hope, and we began to move back down the port alleyway, feeling our way, bodies dead and numbed with cold, shivering uncontrollably. God, let the poop be dry! And then I staggered and hit my shoulder against the wet steel plate of the wall, thrown there by a sudden movement of the ship. I felt it through my whole body, a quiver like the first faint tremor of an earthquake. And then the ship moved again. ‘Listen!’ Patch’s voice was urgent in the darkness. But I could hear nothing except the noise of the sea lapping at the hull. ‘She’s afloat,’ he whispered. ‘Just afloat on top of the tide.’

‘How can she be?’ I said.

‘I don’t know, but she is. Feel her!’

I felt her quiver and lift, and then she thudded back into her gravel bed. But she still went on quivering and from deep down in the bowels of her came a slow grating sound; and all the time she was trembling as though she were stirring in her sleep, struggling to free herself from the deadly reef bed on which she lay. ‘It’s not possible,’ I murmured. The ship couldn’t be afloat when her bows were submerged like a reef and the waves were rolling over them. This must be a dream. And I thought then that perhaps we had drowned out there. Did drowned men go back to their ships and dream that they shook off the reef shackles and voyaged like ghosts through dark, unnatural seas? My mind was beyond coherent thought. The ship was dead. That I knew, and beyond that, all I wanted was to lose consciousness of cold and pain, to lie down and sleep.

A hand reached out and gripped me, holding me up, and my feet trod the iron of the passage-way and climbed, without volition, up into the cold of the night air, to glimpses of stars and a drunken funnel and the unending noise of the sea. Down aft we stumbled over a steel hawser laid taut across the well-deck. It thrummed and sang to the sea’s roll, and the ship moved like a drunkard, tottering its masts against the sky, as we climbed the ladder to the poop’s platform and vanished into the black abyss of the little deckhouse. There was clothing there in the bos’un’s cabin. As I remember, it was neither wet nor dry, but it had more warmth than my own sodden clothes, and there was a dank bunk, with blankets smelling of wet like a dog’s fur, and sleep — the utter oblivion of sleep, more perfect than any heaven ever dreamed of by a well-fed man seated by his own fireside.

A long time after, it seemed — many years, perhaps — the tread of a man’s feet entered into that heavenly oblivion. I can’t say that it woke me or even that I struggled back to consciousness. Not immediately. It was just that the tread of his feet was there; a solid, metallic sound — the ring of boots on steel plates. It was a penetrating, insistent sound. It was above my head, beside my bed, first one side, then the other, and then farther away — a slow, unhurried, purposeful tread… the march of a dead man across the sleep of oblivion. And when it was no longer there I woke.

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